


gravitational pull

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: CousyInSpace, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 10:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11712420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Coulson dreams he's still out there.





	gravitational pull

_He’s falling._

_Floating._

_Blue and green._

_He can’t breathe - suffocating - and quickly._

_His spacesuit malfunctioning, he is drowning among the darkness and the stars._

_It’s not the first time he dies, but this different._

_This time panic, not resignation._

_He’s struggling inside the suit, he’s kicking in a vacuum, making things worse, screaming without making a noise._

_He’s floating._

_He’s dying._

 

Her hands untangle him easily, putting him back on a solid planet, giving him gravity, his own personal atmosphere she.

“I dreamt that-”

“You were still out there, yeah,” she finishes, her hand on the small of his back. Through Daisy’s hands he can sense his own skin hot, sweaty.

“Yes.”

She nods. He can tell by the way her eyes dropped that she’s been there too, but he doesn’t remember waking up to _her_ nightmares. It makes sense, Daisy being Daisy, Daisy being silence, being this small, quiet things when she thinks she might bother others. Now she makes herself big, her body so loud, drowning any other noise, her arms big as planets, draped around Coulson’s shoulders.

“It’s okay now,” Daisy says, a low and knowing voice that sounds so old. “I got you. I found you. It’s okay.”

“You found me,” Coulson repeats, like he needs to tell it to himself, to believe it. Her hand outstretched, just when he thought hope was lost - how come the nightmare always cuts off before that part? He was floating, he was drowning but in the end _he was saved_.

Coulson forces himself to remember, to picture it as it happened.

It’s a memory exercise.

Daisy pulling him into safety, into containment, into gravity - even an artificial one - and hugging him until she could make sure he was okay. A single gesture that precipitated everything else, that lead them back here, to his bed, together.

These arms that now hold him were the same arm that saved him.

These hands that now caress him were the same hands that reached for him among darkness and stars.

Once he couldn’t breathe, now he’s breathing with her.

Daisy smiles, a little relieved to see him push through it.

“Yeah. It took a bit of bartering with some space pirates, but I think I got a bargain,” she jokes, bringing her lips to Coulson’s cheek.

That makes him smile, absurd as it is. Daisy hasn’t really finished telling him all the things she did to find him at the other side of the universe. He suspects she never will - he thinks she is a bit embarrassed. 

She wipes the cold sweat off his forehead while Coulson finishes catching his breath.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You don’t need to thank me for this,” she says, gesturing between them.

“It’s not your job to take care of me like this,” Coulson says, feeling like a burden.

He watches Daisy’s face wrinkle like a piece of paper scrunched in frustration.

“So you shouldn’t have taken care of me all these years? All those times when I was going through something bad and you were there for me?”

It’s not the same, he wants to say, but in a way it is the same. He knows Daisy would have wanted to take care of him like this before, but it took their relationship changing for Coulson to be able to let her. He was the one who had to change. Funny, it doesn’t _feel_ like change - it feels more like becoming himself.

He touches his body, trying to gather himself. After months of different planets, different gravities, or no gravity at all, it feels-

“Heavy?” Daisy guesses.

He nods. 

“Yeah, me too,” she says.

She stretches her body, resting her legs over Coulson’s. 

He reaches out, bound by a strange pull, and puts his hand over Daisy’s knee. She smiles at him, covering it with her own. Her skin is hot and solid, the opposite of being stranded in space. Coulson turns his hand upwards, so he can lace his fingers through hers. It’s all still a bit shocking.

“It’s funny isn’t it,” Daisy says, taking a cue from an expression Coulson didn’t know he was making, with a soft, dreamy tone. “We had to travel to the other end of the universe to find something that was just in front of us.”

She shrugs and makes a little “uh” noise at the back of her throat, like it’s a very fragile concept, pure coincidence that they are here now. It’s different for Coulson, nothing about meeting and falling in love with Daisy feels like a coincidence, even though he hesitates to use the word “fate” because he thinks that means leaving them out of the equation.

Daisy grabs his shoulder and gently coaxes him to lie on his side again. Her touch feels less like a lover’s and more like a parent’s for a second, and Coulson brings his knees closer to his chest. Daisy herself goes back to a sleeping position, and he can tell by the way her body becomes liquid against his back and the way she lets out a long breath, that she is exhausted too. Perhaps it’s that weariness that makes her casually drop her arm around Coulson - he smiles, Daisy doesn’t do these things _casually_ , even her impulsiveness is careful. 

He hesitates before closing his eyes. What if he dreams of choking again? What if he wakes up and he’s still floating, these last few weeks on Earth just a fantasy? Daisy tightens the grip of her arm around him, as if she sensed it.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I got you.”

 

_He’s floating._

_Not falling._

_He’s running out of air but he’s oddly calm about it._

_He doesn’t panic, he doesn’t struggle._

_He waits._

_Among darkness and stars._

_He waits for that hand to reach out to him._

_To be saved._

_To be pulled by some kind of gravity._

_It’s going to be okay._


End file.
